SEO Lessons

Think about this as a daily routine and see if you recognize it.

Get up early.

Get a coffee and turn the computer on. Go straight to your adsense account and get a quick check to see how many ad impressions and clicks you’ve got. See what’s of interest then go to google analytics to drill down into detail of who been looking at your site and why. What search queries are being used and how close are they to the keywords your concentrating on? Where is the traffic coming from? Go to your affiliate account pages and see what activity there’s been. Express silent disapointment. Look at twitter and check out your facebook messages.

Get another coffee

Now that the trivial meaningless stuff is over, get down to the serious business of internet marketing and check your ranking in Market Samurai. Go to Google Reader and see what’s being said in your niche. Read it all. Get distracted by amusing rants about how Macs are great and PCs are shit.

It’s time for another coffee and probably a bite to eat. You could really do with a break to refresh the brain cells and reflect on achievements so far today.

So what have you achieved so far today? Answer: Nothing!

How long have you been “working”? A couple of hours? And you’ve done zip. What’s more, if your numbers are the same as yesterday, you’ve spent 2 hour confirming your miserable failure and you’ve set yourself up for a non-productive day. If your numbers are great, you’re going to spend the rest of the day congratulating yourself on becoming a complete genius in your sleep. You’ve done the equivalent of spending two hours at the water cooler with the company soothsayers sharing meaningless company gossip. Frankly, you’re an idiot!

But don’t be too hard on yourself. You’re in good company. This is a very natural way to behave. It’s a symptom of enthusiasm and commitment. But daily and thorough scrutiny of your business numbers is worse than pointless.

Suppose you grew a tomato plant from seed. Each day, when it’s a seedling, you’d water it once, maybe twice a day. Then, when you plant it outside, you again water it everyday, feed it once a week perhaps and two or three times a week you’d prick out unproductive stems. If you do this, you are likeley to get a strong healthy plant that will grow a few inches each week and eventiually produce some delicious fruit. You could measure it each week to see that it’s growing healthily and get satisfaction from your efforts.

Now, suppose you did this the other way round. Instead of watering the plant every day and measuring it once a week, you measured it once per day and watered it once a week. What would you see? You’d see no change most days (the daily growth isn’t easily measurable) and over the course of a week you’d see some growth. But not for long because you’d eventually see it whither and die because you hadn’t fed and watered it enough.

The Lesson

Instead of counting things that happen, make things happen that count. Feed and water your websites daily. Measure them weekly.

Changes don’t happen daily, they happen weekly or even monthly. Of course you are going to look at some  things daily, it’s important that you do (see SEO Lesson 1)  but don’t do it at the expense of producing quality content and backlinks. That is the food and water that your websites need to grow.

SEO Lessons

I learned this a long time ago. But I only just re-learned it.

In my early career I was a rep. A rep (company representative) sells company products to other companies – usually retailers or customer facing businesses of one form or another. It was in the insurance industry and we didn’t call ourselves “reps”, preferring pretentious titles like “account executive” but we were reps. Anyway, selling of this sort, like most selling, is a numbers game. The more calls you make, the more quotes you get, the more people you see the more business you get. And every week we’d report to our sales manager about how much business we’d won. Not how many calls we’d done or how many quotes, but how much money we’d made. This is fair enough – we were in business to make money. But I was a little dissatisfied with this and decided to do my own style of sales management.

You need to understand this in context because this was in the early 1990s. People didn’t have PCs at home. The computers people used at work were dumb terminals that performed very specific work related functions. People were not generally computer literate so when I began using a spreadsheet on a handheld Psion 3a, my colleagues and sales manager thought I was just a geek. But what I did was really simple. I recorded the number of calls I made each week, the number of quotations requests I received and the amount of business I got in. Over the course of 4-6 weeks I was able to see a pattern emerge. Approximately  4 weeks after a spike in the number of calls I did, there would be a spike in the number of quotations and I was begining to see the next spike. 1 to 2 weeks after the quotations spike was a business spike.

So I was seeing the confirmation of the adage that it was a numbers game. If I did more calls I’d get more business and I’d know approximately when that would happen. I become motivated to do more calls. I became more self assured and less fearful to report a poor week because I knew exactly why it had happened and could report what I’d done to improve the numbers.

This is all pretty simple stuff. Anyone with any sales or business management experience will be very familiar with this.

I learned this technique 20 years ago – but I wasn’t doing it to measure my web marketing activities. The penny dropped a few weeks ago when I recalled my sales experience and I began to record all of my key measures and as a result, I began to learn why some of my websites were being successful and why some were not.

The Lesson

Measure what you do. Record how much content you create. Record how many interactions you have using social media. Measure the quality of content. (A quick blog post is different from a key word optimized article). Record all activity that you think is important. Compare this activity to you unique visitor count or your sales figures – whatever measures are important to you and your on-line goals. Don’t go over the top to the point where you’re measuring more than doing – that’s what SEO Lesson 2 is about.

You will see trends emerge that will teach you which activities deliver results and it will motivate you to concentrate only on the things that count.